Chapter 9

From Intermediate
to Professional

It’s a good indicator you may want to start reading more when you’re comfortable with your abilities and feel like you’re ready to help other people. You will likely feel drawn to reading for others on a regular basis. It is important, however, to get their permission before tuning in to them psychically as you don’t want to be intrusive. You will probably find the more you’re able to read for others, the more people will reach out to you to help them in some way, usually through word of mouth. This is a great step toward becoming a professional.

At this point in your development you may feel the urge to begin offering some type of professional services. You can start off slowly or go full speed ahead; it’s your choice as long as you’re ready. Becoming a professional isn’t just about your psychic abilities, though. There is more to it than merely using the skills you’ve developed. Learning how to be ethical and how to proceed is almost as important as your metaphysical intelligence.

You Don’t Have to Have It
All to Move Forward

The key to moving forward with your practice is knowing you don’t have to know everything or be able to do it all to progress. Each gift or level of development comes with a sense of pride and ownership, which feels wonderful. But, attaining new skills is not the only thing you should focus on. Learning more within each ability is just as crucial to expand your abilities. Bringing your talents along through every aspect of your development will serve you well with your overall growth. Think of your development like a pond. With everything you learn or dive into, a ripple is created that extends throughout the entire body of water. This ripple contributes to and creates change throughout the whole pond, or your overall psychic awareness. This, in turn, allows you to continually increase your knowledge in the metaphysical realm. Lateral movement, discovering similar things while discovering the propensity for other gifts, is also forward progression.

Now is a great time to look back on everything you’ve done so far. Taking stock of your psychic inventory will help you better gauge what you’ve got a knack for and what you want to work on. Notice I didn’t say “what you need.” This isn’t about needing to do anything. For you to move forward, you just have to want it. It is this desire that will keep you going—that and the effort you put into it.

Exercise

What You Know and What
You Want to Know

This is an exercise to review which psychic gifts you feel comfortable with and which you still want to work on. It’s also a chance to evaluate which gifts you feel you want to develop further, because you feel you resonate with them. Get your journal and create a table like the one below, or fill this one in. Come back to the table as you continue practicing your abilities throughout the rest of the book.

Psychic Ability, Activity, or Tool	Comfortable	Need to Develop	Want More of This Gift	Set a Goal	Practiced with Others	Using Gift to Read Others
Clairvoyance
Clairaudience
Clairsentience
Claircognizance
Clairalience
Clairgustance
Psychic symbols
Energy work
Chakra system
Psychic Ability, Activity, or Tool	Comfortable	Need to Develop	Want More of This Gift	Set a Goal	Practiced with Others	Using Gift to Read Others
Meditation
Astral travel
Psychometry
Transfiguration
Intuitive evidence
Insight from past life

Were you surprised at what you wrote down or what you feel comfortable with? Were you able to set goals for each item? Determining where you are gives you the opportunity to make a conscious effort to bring your gifts to the next level by working on your weaknesses and enhancing your strengths. Acknowledging you may excel at one gift or one tool can provide you with the confidence you need to move forward—remember, you don’t have to have it all to go beyond, but you do need to be honest and ethical.

Ethics and Responsibilities

Ethics weave their way through every aspect of professionalism. This is especially true when you provide psychic readings. When people come to you, they trust you to have their best interests at heart when you provide them with a session. You direct them on what may be the most important life-changing events they will ever have. You may also connect them to their deceased loved ones and you want to be sure you know who you are working with. They are looking to you for guidance and you must give it to them without inserting your own opinions or ideas about their situations, regardless of how you may personally feel. You owe them a judgment-free reading. This is what they pay you for. You also owe them the truth, which you should provide them in a safe way, free of censoring, but given in love. Overall, you are responsible for their reading, and they are responsible for what they do with the information. This starts with a positive, ethically clean session.

When I first started I didn’t want to just hang a shingle that said “Psychic” without being sure I knew what I was doing, so I set out to learn everything I could about psychic abilities. I wanted to be able to answer my clients’ and my own questions about how psychic abilities worked. I studied with others and on my own to find out how others performed and connected. It is important to learn from the perspective of other practitioners as well—it supplies you with a deeper understanding of the way intuitives work. You need to be the best psychic you can be, otherwise you are doing your sitters a disservice.

Being ethical is crucial. You must be completely honest and truthful in your readings. You can’t lie about the messages you receive, and you can’t pick and choose what to tell your clients. What you can do is soften any harsh communications you get. You don’t ever want to talk in absolutes. We have free will and can change the course of our lives depending on the choices we make. Share the best possible outcomes, rather than the worst, and how your sitter may arrive there. Don’t deal in fatalities. If you are a medium, you never want to scare people with doom and gloom predictions, even if the client begs for it. You should, however, empower them. For example, if you see an accident, you could discuss new directions they may want to take to avoid an accident. Or share things with them they might want to avoid doing, which may cause the bad possible outcome you see. While it is your ethical responsibility to share what you receive, it is up to you to decide how to do that.

Essentially, you want to empower your clients by being optimistic. Regardless of what messages you receive, it’s the delivery that you’re responsible for. Sharing the information in a positive, life-affirming way will always trump any negativity or negative approaches. The purpose of giving a reading is to inspire someone to enjoy, improve, and make powerful their life. It is also to help them discover their greatness. If you connect them to their deceased loved ones through mediumship, it is even more reason to spread love and encouragement instead of negativity.

So, how do you turn something bad into something good? If you psychically hear your client is going to get fired next month, would you say, “You’re going to get canned next month!” or “Now would be the perfect time to research other career or job possibilities. I think you might want to think about what you would love doing and begin interviewing for new positions now—it’s the perfect time for you to start something new! It’s a good time to let go of your old job!”? If they ask if that means they are going to lose their job, you can be honest, but again, in a productive way. “I do see that as a serious possibility, but I also feel you can find something better for yourself!” Again, it’s about your delivery and the way you present the information to your clients. Do it with love, respect, and consideration and you will always provide a positive reading, regardless of what is coming through. You don’t want to lie to them, but you can provide them with a different perspective. Sometimes, there’s no good way to twist it. I always tell my clients to take what I say with a grain of salt. It’s one possible outcome. They have freedom of choice, which can always change things and, besides that, we psychics are not always 100 percent right! We need to give them the information we receive and let them decide what to do with it.

Another way to be sure you always remain ethical is to devise a standard for yourself. I treat my clients as though they are my patients and I am their doctor. In other words, I use doctor-patient privilege, or confidentiality. I only share content from readings in books or with others when I ask for permission. Otherwise, their readings stay their own. I don’t share client names or how they reacted to messages unless they give permission. This is their time and they need to feel they are in a safe place during one of their most vulnerable times. Many clients are so emotional they begin to cry while I explain my process of how I work. They are so worked up, sensitive and nervous, hoping to receive good news or to communicate with their loved ones, that they are already tearful. The air is also charged with the energy of the universe, specifically for them, so it can be an incredibly powerful time. This is no one else’s business. Be responsible and compassionate—you hold their heart in your hand; don’t crush it.

Don’t Let Conflicting Sensations and
Emotions Hold You Back

My husband tends to get very excited about things. He is a car buff; I’d like to refer to it as a hobby, but a hobby shouldn’t cost this much! He recently finished restoring and souping up a 1967 Mustang. He has done a fine job and the car is amazing. Now comes the time to register it so he can drive it to car shows. He is so excited, he can’t wait to get it on the road. At the same time, he wants to throw up. He is worried about going to the Department of Motor Vehicles. He is concerned they will ask him for more information, or that they won’t register it. He has no real basis for this worry, he just feels it intensely because it’s very important to him. He is also worried that if he drives it on the road, it will break down, and then what would he do? Here’s the problem. He is mixing his extreme excitement with his fear, and it’s overwhelming. He needs to separate the two, allow that there are always possibilities that something can go wrong, but that he is justified in being over-the-top happy.

Once he separated the two emotions, he went to the Department of Motor Vehicles and he registered his car with no problems. He had elevated his emotions so much he was in a whirlwind. Recognizing the two highly charged, distinct feelings weren’t mutually dependent, he accomplished what he set out to do. Providing psychic readings can cause this same extreme feeling. Mixing the excitement of connecting with your gifts and the fear of being wrong or not receiving anything can keep you from moving forward and offering sessions. Holding each in its own space will expedite your ability to read for others.

When you have extreme passion, you feel things strongly. It’s hard to stifle those feelings. This is fine if it doesn’t hinder you or harm anyone. The problem that arises when you work with psychic abilities is that you deal with sensations. You count on your impressions to provide you with the information you need to share with your clients. When you have other feelings (that have nothing to do with the reading) clouding your perception, it can make it almost impossible to tune in and deliver a good session. Learning to separate the two can be crucial to move your psychic abilities beyond a beginner level. You will always be an emotional being, so separating your feelings from your psychic feelings will be a constant, ongoing process, but understanding the need to do that and learning how to discern the difference is essential.

Exercise

Separating and Understanding
Your Overlapping Sensations

Discovering how to separate the sensations you experience starts with feeling the sensations and becoming comfortable with how they affect you. Allow your imagination to contribute to this exercise.

Close your eyes. Pay attention to how your body feels. Start with your heart and work your way out. If you are relaxed, you might feel a warm sensation spread through you. Notice how it feels as your attention moves out to your limbs and up through your neck. Now focus on how your head and face feel.

Next, imagine something in your life you are afraid of. Let it be something other than your psychic gifts. For example, if you are afraid of heights, imagine you are on the edge of a twenty-story building. If you’re afraid of spiders, you might imagine someone dumping an entire bucket of them all over your body. Or, imagine a practical fear of not having enough money to pay your bills.

Now, focus on how your heart area feels. You might experience a more rapid heart rate or rapid breathing. Pay attention to how your body feels as you move your focus further out through your legs and arms, up into your neck. Are you feeling tingly? Is there a jumpy or nervous sensation creeping through you? Experience that feeling for a moment or two.

Then, take a deep breath and clear that energy. Think of something that makes you feel neutral, like a tomato or a tablecloth or even a random T-shirt. Focus on that for a moment, bringing you back to center. Try to empty your mind. Don’t worry if there is anything trying to hold on; acknowledge your thoughts and then release them.

Finally, imagine getting ready to do a reading for someone. Think about how you connect, whether it’s clairvoyance, clairaudience, claircognizance, clairsentience, or some combination of them. Now, focus on how it feels in your body. Again, start in your heart area. Do you feel little palpitations of excitement? Or trepidations as your nerves spark? Notice how your body feels as you imagine tuning in. Feel the sensations in your arms, legs, head, and solar plexus as you think about connecting to your guides and those of someone else.

When you are all set, process how it went. What did you feel? Did each situation feel totally different? Did it feel the same? Did you notice how the sensations may overlap? You can continue practicing this with other thoughts, situations, and emotions at any time. Figure out how each condition affects you and whether it’s similar to your psychic sensations.

Discovering how each situation affects you can contribute to how you comprehend your psychic gifts. Knowing how it feels in your body when you experience any type of ESP or extrasensory perception will help you develop your abilities even further. Clear the sensation that’s not pertinent to the situation. Understanding how to separate the extraneous sensations from the intuitive ones gives you a leg up toward taking your gifts beyond a beginner level.

Celebrate Failure

We are taught from an early age to celebrate winning. If we play a sport, the whole point is to beat your opponent. If we apply to college, we celebrate the acceptance letter. If we search for a significant other, we celebrate finding a match. We rarely celebrate the failures, or we forget about them in lieu of celebrating our wins. How about looking at it from a different perspective? Losing a game may help teach us to cope with disappointment. Being denied admission to our college of choice may provide us with an alternative school that accelerates our degree, and we might meet lifelong friends there. Being snubbed or dumped leads you to being introduced to your incredible future partner. Celebrating failures while developing your psychic abilities is very similar. Not being able to connect to someone’s energy using your clairvoyance, or not “seeing” anything for someone, may enable you to change your method and instead use your clairaudience to “listen” for information. Doing this simple switch can grant you access to even more evidence than you could have hoped for to help yourself or your client.

I did a reading for Christine recently. Before she came in for the reading, I tuned in to her energy. Normally the information I write down first are character traits or physical appearances. This time was different. Instead of writing down basic descriptors about my client, I wrote two simple words for Christine: “I CAN.” Next to that I wrote, “This is your new mantra—say aloud every day, at least three times a day!” At the time, I had no idea why I had written it, or why. When I told her that was the first and most important part of her reading, it was prolific. I had no idea it would cause such an outpouring of emotion and tears. Apparently, she had been going through a rough patch, as she often seemed to with her work. As she described it, everything she was doing for work was just good enough, but she never felt like it was great. She was at yet another crossroads with the programs she offered and whether she could continue, and more than that, if she could make it great. She felt like everything she did failed, and failed miserably.

I received a message from Christine today. Her daily disposition, as well as her life outlook, seems to have changed from a place of failure to a place of “I CAN.”

“You told me my mantra for the year was ‘I CAN,’ and it has been in my head this week. It’s helping me with everything I have to deal with. So many commitments that I would normally say, ‘No, I can’t do that!’ to, I am saying ‘I CAN’ and things are moving right along.”

She learned from her failures. She took advantage of the wisdom she had gained, and instead of continuing to view her previous efforts as failures, she looked to them as learning blocks. Obviously, she was now on her way toward celebrating not just her previous fails, but her soon-to-come victories. Everything in life is dichotomous. There are two sides and we need to keep the balance—good and bad, just and unjust, fair and unfair, black and white, yin and yang, boy and girl, dog and cat, fast and slow, power and weakness, struggle and ease. Celebrating failure allows you to own both contradicting sides from one situation.

Exercise

Celebrate Your Failures

Grab your journal and open to a fresh page. Draw a line down the middle. On the top of the left side write “Failure” and on top of the right side write “Celebrate.” Now, think back to a time when you felt you failed at something. It could be a relationship or a work issue or a personal attempt at something. Write that down under the “Failure” column.

After you’ve written it, stop and think about what you wrote. Then, think about what good came out of it. What positive turn of events came from that particular failure? Record your answer in the right-hand column under “Celebrate.” If you’re not sure, leave space for now. The positive results may not have occurred yet, or you might remember them later. Continue writing down more failures, leaving enough room to record a lot of celebrations next to them.

Now, record any failed attempt at psychic readings. Possibly during some of the previous exercises you’ve had a hard time connecting. Write these down. Maybe your celebration was simply the desire to continue learning, or that you were able to perform the tasks in a different way, one you never knew you could do. Also think of any times you tried to use your pre-cognitive skills (intuiting the future) that didn’t work out. Did anything come from that? Write down your celebrations.

While many failed attempts at successfully using your psychic gifts may drive you to quit trying, you’ve come quite a long way to let any failures keep you from succeeding. Understanding what you can learn from your ineffective endeavors can provide more wisdom than success at times. Just remember, your efforts do not go unrewarded. You learn from everything you do, and your attempts to tune in are not in vain. Often, it is merely time that is necessary to progress, and every exercise you cannot perform is not in futility—it may just require repetition to prove fruitful.

Fighting Off Your Inner Skeptic

I am one of the biggest skeptics I know. I always try to debunk if someone feels haunted or if someone is having what they believe to be paranormal occurrences. I also look for more than just a generic reading and I have a hard time trusting a psychic I feel doesn’t have their client’s best interests as their agenda. I am also always challenging myself to try to fight off my own inner skeptic regarding others and myself. I, like many of you, want clear evidence. I need the wow factor. I want immediate validation that what I share with my clients is, indeed, coming from the universal energy or the other side and not just my imagination. This always keeps me on high alert during a session. It creates a feeling of exhilaration before the session. It can also mess with psychic abilities. When you do professional readings, you must give what you get; you can never be skeptical. It holds you back and censors the information that may mean nothing to you, but can mean everything to your client.

You can’t tailor a session to what you expect to get or what you think you should present to whomever you are reading for. You also can’t censor the information you receive because you think it doesn’t make sense. Your inner skeptic will always try to discourage you, even tell you, in a not so subtle way, that you’re wrong. It can create confusion and even disorientation during your session and will often create a sense of doubt that will cloud every perception you have.

Pushing aside your inner skeptic can allow you to be more receptive to psychic messages. It keeps you from diminishing the possibilities that you are connected and helps you to translate successfully what you tune in to. Being a healthy skeptic, however, is all right. It means you don’t jump to automatic conclusions for everything and you expect to feel some type of connection. This is okay. It’s okay to not believe every situation, but also be open to what’s coming, regardless of whether you immediately understand it or not.

I was at a women’s retreat a few years ago. I met a friend named Jen there, and she was getting ready to leave. She looked at me and asked, “Okay, so I just want to know … what do you get about me? Is there anyone who wants to tell me something?” Now, this is a very generic question, and normally it opens a stream of psychic visions, but this time I was just getting one thing.

“Why am I seeing a cow?” I laughed.

“Well, hmmm. Are you saying I’m going to get really big and fat?” Jen asked, shocked, but with a giggle.

“Ha!” I responded. “No, but I am definitely getting something about dairy. Like, do you love milk or cheese or something? Dairy allergy? What is up with the dairy?”

Now, if I had been skeptical, I would not have told her about the cow or taken it further. But, I trusted my intuition would give me information that could be interpreted.

“All right. Tell me about dairy. Obviously, there is something to this, but I’m not quite getting what it is. You have a big connection to it, though, in some way,” I shared with her.

“The only thing I can think of is that I grew up in a town called Derry. It is not spelled the same way, but could that be it?” Jen asked, serious now.

“Ah, that absolutely is it. Your loved ones are letting you know they’re around. They are sharing where you are from as evidence,” I told her.

We then went on to discuss her experiences there, in Derry. Even though it was, essentially, a free reading, I still felt I needed to give her accurate information. If I had let my inner skeptic override my psychic impression, we would not have connected. Jen wouldn’t have known her family members from Derry were reaching out to her, and I would not have known that I was really tuning in.

Free Readings

Once you’ve progressed past the beginning stage of psychic development, meaning you are more right than wrong with interpreted messages and you’re comfortable with your abilities, you may be itching to qualify your gifts by offering regular readings. If you find yourself in an intermediate or even advanced level of intuitive development, you might want to start working your way toward becoming a professional. Working for free sounds like an oxymoron. However, doing free readings pays you in different ways. It allows you to practice in a professional environment, without the pressure of needing to provide a reading for someone’s money. It does not mean you should treat the reading as anything other than professional though. You are still providing guidance to someone who is counting on your advice. Offering free readings in the beginning helps you grow your confidence as a consultant. You need to have faith that what you’re doing for others is in their best possible interests and the information you bring through is clear from your own judgment and censorship. Providing free psychic consultations brings you a deeper awareness and gets you ready for your professional career.

When you offer free readings, it takes the pressure off you. The idea that you give a reading to someone when they are paying for it can cause you to cloud your reception of messages because you are so intent on making sure you are giving them their money’s worth. Paying for something creates a higher expectation and that puts an added burden of stress on you to get everything right. By not asking for anything in return, you are free to focus on your work instead of the result.

Giving free readings does have a different dynamic in comparison to a paid reading, though. When you give away a reading, there is no exchange of value. When you don’t charge for the session, some people don’t associate a great deal of worth with it. If it doesn’t cost them anything, they may not listen to what you have to say as much as they would if they paid for the session. So, it might behoove you to ask for some type of alternative energy exchange. Have them send you positive energy or pull a couple of oracle cards for you. They don’t need to be psychic to offer you these small tokens of appreciation that can be good for you, and, more important, it will make them value the reading more.

Providing free readings can be kind of tricky. You can offer them to your friends, but you want to try to work with people you don’t know as well. Reading for strangers allows you to deliver an unbiased and non-judgmental session, rather than one you inevitably interlace with your own thoughts and feelings. You can extend an offer for a free reading to your friends and followers on social media, explaining you are practicing and offer no guarantees. Another great way to find clients is to ask your group of friends to extend the invitation to their friends. Be sure to let everyone you give a reading to know to take what you say with a grain of salt. You are providing these readings to fine-tune your gifts and it’s up to them to decide what to do with the information you provide.

Your Process

Your process can be an important part of offering readings, no matter the type. It offers you a structure where normally there may be none. I have established a process in my business and it’s remained pretty much my standard for quite a while.

Before every reading, I tune in to my client’s energy. I write down everything I receive from the universe about them. I include the basics about them, which helps me get into their energy, such as looks, personality, characteristics, and even hopes and fears. I will also write initials or names of any of their deceased loved ones who give me information or want to connect. I include any current, past, or even future events I receive, and I share dates or locations that I get psychically. When my clients come in, I begin the reading by going over everything I have on my paper—this usually opens us up to things they may want to know about or have questions about. Believe it or not, it usually fills the entire session time. I also tell clients I will not remember what I tell them, and I may not even recognize them or their name after the session. The information I receive is channeled through me, for them, and I don’t hold on to any of it! In fact, I have to tell them to remind me of sessions if they want to be included in my books—this usually jogs my memory of the reading enough that I am able to write about it. Your process should be your own, just as my process works for me. Develop a procedure that works for you and helps you get into the energy of your client. You are on your way to become a professional.

No matter what your aspirations are, psychic or otherwise, you need to live by a code of ethics. This should be your standard, regardless of what you do, but very important with psychic work. We are also responsible for our thoughts and our actions. Our thoughts become our reality. We need to rethink how we think. Celebrate your failures as well as your successes. Believe in yourself, and be open to receive and give psychic messages, even if that means you must temporarily battle your inner skeptic. I say temporarily because once you begin the battle, your inner skeptic shrinks. A healthy amount will persist, but the cynicism will start to dissipate and what remains will be laced with excitement rather than fear.

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